Visual impact, what to expect from a small wind turbine
How does the shadows from the TWT-11 project? What can be done with smart placement, and what time of year is the worst? We will try our best to explain a few key things in this blog and introduce you to our small shadow simulator!
Large wind turbines are notorious for their large visual impact due to substantial height and rotor diameter. These two things coupled together means that the shadow and flicker problems are huge.
Here the small scale is a huge advantage! With a hub height of 9.5 m for the German version and 15 m for the Danish one the TWT-11 creates a relatively small shadow zone to begin with.
In addition to that the tethered tower setup minimize the shadow casting cross-section.
That leads us to the one major thing on the TWT-11, the rotor. At 89 m<sup>2</sup> the flickering shadow size is larger than the competitors. In order to examine how this spreads over the year we have built a small worst case simulator.
The assumptions behind it is that the shadow is caused by a Ø11 m sphere which is the rotor diameter which is considered the worst case scenario.
The reason why it is worst case is that it basically assumes that the turbine is, solid and operating in all directions at once. This is of course impossible, but it creates a good baseline for selecting the most appropriate spot on your location.